Here's the first of several lantern props for the Izakaya scene. It took me a while to figure out a good way of achieve the emissive scattering effect that occurs when light hits paper. I went with a blended emissive map, blending the red paper material with an underlying yellowish halogen light, as a kind of a shortcut. I have not yet explored the capabilities of transmissive maps in Physically Based Shaders. In the real world, paper is a very thin material, which can be troublesome to deal with when you're working with low polygon objects.

I modeled the asset in 3DS Max and textured it in both Substance Painter and Substance Designer.

I'm increasingly wondering why Substance Painter and Designer were designed to be separate applications. It would be lovely to have Substance Painter as a toolset within Substance Designer, to be able to work in those two distinct methodologies in a lot more fluidity. For instance, accomplishing tasks such as creating procedural effects and textures is a lot more intuitive in Substance Designer, but painting effects directly onto your model in Substance Painter is also extremely intuitive, but in a different way. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons to have them separate, but I feel like it would speed things up a lot, at least for me right now, if at any time during the texturing process inside Substance Painter I could simply bring up my graph and add or subtract things using the graph editing functionality Substance Designer, which in my view ultimately offers a lot more control. I'm sure if my computer were better I could have all of my resources linked between applications and have both applications open at the same time.

Here's the wireframe of the low poly mesh. Seeing as I am not developing the scene for a game engine at the moment, I've given a generous amount of geometry to even the props of the scene. I could have cut the polygon count down a lot, by simplifying the main cylindrical shape of the lantern. The bumpy effect I was going for comes from what would be an underlying chassis/support for the paper. I decided to model it to this extent because it was looking a lot better this way and because I'm not taxed for polycount in this relatively small scene.